Lionel Messi Drives MLS Record Ticket Revenue for Chicago Fire – Sportico.com

Since Lionel Messi joined MLS in July, the Inter Miami star has delivered huge revenue boosts for opposing teams whenever his team goes on the road. Few, if any, will benefit more than the Chicago Fire.

Chicago is averaging about 15,000 fans per game this year at Soldier Field, the 62,000-seat home of the NFL’s Bears. The team’s Oct. 4 home game against Inter Miami is already nearing a sellout, and the Fire have passed $9.5 million in ticket sales, according to someone familiar with the details.

That’s already a record for ticket gate for any game in MLS history, regular season or playoff, with a few thousand tickets left to move. It’s projecting to be about 55% of the team’s ticket revenue for the whole season, the person said.

The Chicago Fire are worth about $535 million, according to Sportico’s most recent valuations. While that ranks 17th in MLS, the team was projected to be near the bottom in revenue last season.

One game against Inter Miami will change that dramatically. Dave Baldwin, the team’s president of business operations, said the team was fortunate to be in that position but also wary about the imbalance.

“The downside is that you end up with a really significant number that’s attributed to one event, and there’s a lot of danger when you have that much variability in your P&L,” he said. “So a big focus for us has been making sure that we’re using this as an inflection point to grow our fans and the season ticket base.” 

“It’s almost trying to kill three birds with one stone,” he added. “How do we make sure we capitalize on the revenue opportunity right now and, at the same time, make sure we’re taking care of our current supporters and also setting the club up for long-term success?”

To attempt that balance, the Fire hiked ticket prices, set aside tickets for loyal fans at a discount and tried to encourage fans to think beyond just Oct. 4. Here are the details of that plan: 

Ticket Prices: Before Messi announced that he was coming to MLS, the Fire had sold about 10,000 tickets to the Miami game. Many of those were season ticket holders, Baldwin said, whose tickets were priced at $25 to $50. While the team dramatically increased prices for the game following Messi’s announcement, it also built in cheaper options for its most loyal fans. For starters, it set aside thousands of additional tickets that existing season ticket-holders could buy at a discounted rate of the new prices. It also offered about 8,000 tickets at a discount to existing group buyers, such as church groups or youth teams, who have previously bought in bulk. Additionally, Baldwin said the team is also giving away “several hundred blocks” of tickets to people in underprivileged local communities.

Multi-game Deals: Similar to the New York Red Bulls’ strategy when they hosted Inter Miami in August, the Fire packaged a number of tickets to this game into two- and three-game bundles, Baldwin said. Those bundles offered discounts on the Miami game, he said, meaning fans could pay less if they also added tickets to other games at Soldier Field. Looking even further ahead, the Fire granted complimentary access to this year’s Miami game to anyone who signed up for 2024 season tickets or a season suite.

Fan Data: Every week, the team is giving away Miami tickets as part of a free-to-enter sweepstakes, which has allowed the team to add “tens of thousands” of new emails to its database of prospective local ticket-buyers, Baldwin said.

Ticket Pricing: The game isn’t entirely sold out yet; about 2,000 seats are remaining. To price those seats, Baldwin said, the club is closely monitoring the secondary market. The Fire want the primary tickets to be priced close to, but below the secondary market—a move that it views as both fan-friendly and a protection against bots and brokers who may be looking for resale arbitrage opportunities. As an example, Baldwin said, “If the average secondary price in an area is $230 or $240 plus fees, we want to put it at $199 or in the low $200s.” 

Bots and Brokers: There was initially a limit on how many tickets a fan could buy at once, but back in June, the team did flag and refund a handful of buyers from out of town who tried to purchase large swaths of tickets, Baldwin said. It also flagged a number of people who were buying 20+ parking passes for the game, hoping to do a similar arbitrage with those items.

Suites: The Inter Miami game will be the first time that the Fire have sold out all 130 suites at Soldier Field. For a standard Fire game, suits typically sell for $2,500 to $4,000; for Miami, they were priced around $8,000 and rose to more than $15,000, Baldwin said. The stadium also has five field suites behind the goals. Those typically sell for $3,000 to $5,000 and earlier this week, the club sold the last one for $50,000.

Adding Seats: The team added roughly 200 premium seats to Soldier Field specifically for the Miami game, including three rows endline seats along the field and a few dozen field-side seats adjacent to the two benches. Sale prices of those seats ranged from $995 to $5,000.

Gameday Sponsor: Last month, the Fire also sold a presenting sponsorship to the Inter Miami game. That’s part of a new, larger multiyear partnership with energy drink Celsius, also the league’s official partner.

Messi Contingency Plan: Baldwin said the club was considering an offer for fans with tickets if Messi does not play in the game against the Fire (Messi did not make the trip to Inter Miami’s Sept. 16 game in Atlanta). That could include a “small credit” toward the next Miami game in Chicago, he said.